


Comfort Me With Apples

by phoebesmum



Category: Sports Night
Genre: F/M, Family, Happy Ending, Marriage, Pre-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-10
Updated: 2009-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-04 08:13:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way to a man's heart is ... ah, you know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comfort Me With Apples

**Author's Note:**

> Written October 2007, for the request _Isaac and Esther cooking a meal_.

Isaac had been a bachelor for a very long time when he first met Esther. Now, stereotypes and _Odd Couple_ allusions notwithstanding, it's a fact that unmarried men can be split, by and large, into one of two camps: the squalid and the pernickety. It shouldn't be too hard to guess on which side of the fence Isaac fell. Esther, on first seeing his apartment, spent a lot of time casting surreptitious glances around the sparkling surfaces and hoping with all her heart that Isaac, like her own parents, employed a cleaning lady.

It was on their third date that Isaac decided it was time he cook Esther a meal. Isaac was an excellent cook, which was a matter of simple expediency. He liked to eat, and eat well, he lived alone – _ergo_, he would learn to cook. Nothing overly fancy, nothing _Cordon Bleu_, but he'd taken a few classes and he'd had plenty of time to practise. He could find his way around a kitchen – he was willing, modestly, to admit that much, and accustomed to his guests' extravagant (and sometimes unflatteringly astonished) praise.

He wasn't accustomed to guests who probed around his cabinets and tried to lend a hand.

"What's this?" Esther demanded.

Isaac was slicing peppers into neat, symmetrical slices at that precise moment, and only had time for a brief glance upward. "Egg separator," he said briefly, and returned to his chopping board – which meant that he missed the wide-eyed look of 'What the hell?!' that Esther cast his way.

A moment later she had another question.

"Isaac?" There was a peculiar tremor to her voice, as though she were suppressing laughter or, perhaps, panic. "Isaac, why is there a blowtorch in your kitchen?"

He looked up again, to see her brandishing the utensil in question. It was, to be fair, only a _tiny_ blowtorch, and it served a perfectly practical purpose. "It's for caramelising _Crème Brûlée_," he explained, reasonably enough he thought, and was a little puzzled when Esther hastily excused herself to the bathroom, didn't return for a good five minutes and, when she did, had a suspiciously dark flush to her cheeks.

Then she looked into his knife drawer and had to excuse herself again. Perplexed, Isaac slid it open himself and peeked inside. No: there was nothing out of the ordinary there. What other way (he asked himself) was there to arrange a knife drawer if not in strict order of size? Now, if he'd arranged them by gradations of sharpness, _that_ might have been a little strange.

And the important thing was that the meal was, as ever, a success. Maybe not a triumph, maybe not his greatest ever – you had to make allowances for nerves – but pretty damn good. And Esther, who was, he was glad to see, a girl with an appetite, clearly relished every mouthful, from the duck terrine through the seafood _panache_ to the champagne sorbet, each with their attendant wine.

All in all, Isaac was satisfied. In more ways than one. Esther was also, it turned out, a girl who knew how to show her appreciation.

She was, furthermore, a girl with a great sense of obligation, so nothing would do but that, a week or so later, she decided she ought to return the favour. As he slid his car onto her parents' driveway, Isaac noted that Esther's was the only other car visible. Later he realised his suspicions should have been aroused then, but at the time he simply assumed that Esther's parents were discreetly allowing the young folks ('young', in Isaac's case, being a relative term) their privacy. Later enquiries elicited the fact that they had given the staff the night off, their daughter the run of the kitchen, and had hurriedly cleared the decks, anticipating disaster.

'Disaster' would have been overly harsh. The meal Esther had produced was perfectly edible; the cliché of the helpless, harassed housewife producing a burnt offering for a celebratory dinner is one that belongs in the world of hula hoops and pedal pushers and _I Love Lucy_. She had even, for the most part, avoided the common beginner's mistake of being over-ambitious. The pastry she'd made for her onion tartlets was a little dry and hard – but then, not every chef can be a pastry cook, and the filling had set perfectly, even if it was a little lacking in flavour; she'd simply grilled steaks for a main course, and accomplished it as though she'd been doing so from her cradle, and if the accompanying vegetables were cooked to a watery pulp, well, what of it? No, the only real problem was dessert. There Esther had tragically overreached herself; she'd rashly attempted _Crêpes Suzette_, and the consequences were, sadly, inevitable. Isaac helped her put out the fire and scrape up all visible traces of wayward batter, and then he mopped up her tears, poured her a glass of the brandy that remained conveniently to hand, swept her up and out of the house, and took her to a nearby diner for three different sorts of ice-cream, and all kinds of well-meaning words of consolation.

Which backfired.

"What do you _mean_, 'it was fine'?" Esther demanded, her eyes flashing. "It was _not_ fine, and you know it!"

"Well …" Isaac backpedalled. "It wasn't _bad_. That is – I mean, for a first attempt – it was your first attempt …?" he added, fearing that he'd just dug himself deeper into a hole.

"Then why did you say 'fine'?" Esther, Isaac was starting to realise, was not easily swayed from her purpose.

"I – " he said, weakly.

"I'm an adult!" Esther informed him. "I expect to be treated like one! If I mess up, then _tell_ me I've messed up!"

"I was just trying to make you happy," Isaac offered, still more lamely yet.

"By _lying_ to me?"

"For what it's worth," he offered, "It wasn't so much a lie as ... just putting a better complexion on the truth ...?"

She snorted, most inelegantly, and he sighed.

"Esther. Honey. It _wasn't_ a lie. I enjoyed the meal. I enjoyed your company. I appreciate the effort you took. Aren't those things more important than …" In spite of his better nature, he was unable to control a slight twitch of his lower lip. "Than being able to cook a pancake without burning the house down?"

She glared at him for a long, long moment. Then suddenly she started to giggle. And then they were both laughing, and a moment later she was in his arms and kissing him, and he was calling for the check and they were back in his car and then heading for a secluded backroad that Esther just happened to know (Isaac preferred not to ask her how) and, somewhere among all the words that were, eventually, spoken that night, 'marry?' and 'yes!' featured large in the mix.

Sometime between the proposal and the wedding, Esther vanished for a month. Isaac, away on assignment, only registered that her letters bore unfamiliar postmarks, and didn't ask too many questions why. But when he got back and found her in his kitchen, calmly preparing a welcome-home meal of many courses and intricate complexity, he was smart enough to figure it out.

Esther does all the cooking nowadays. Isaac is allowed to barbecue, but only on _very_ special occasions. Both their daughters were encouraged to help in the kitchen as soon as they were old enough to stand on a chair and stir the mixing bowl. Kathy made her first dish of _crêpes_ at age 11, and, to this day, doesn't know why her parents made such a tremendous to-do about the whole business. It wasn't, after all, that there was so very much to it.

Esther's knife drawer, however, is allowed to remain in whatever state of chaos it chooses.

 

***


End file.
